


Live, Look, And Feel

by tb_ll57



Series: Nor Perish and Decay [8]
Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, ancient!Methos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 07:08:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2220117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tb_ll57/pseuds/tb_ll57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wants so many words from Methos, he wants <i>explanations</i> and <i>answers</i> and <i>lie to me if you have to, just tell me something</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Live, Look, And Feel

MacLeod would be bored with the truth.

The pace of change in the last century wearies him. Frightens him, sometimes, though he is old enough that fear is a sluggish thing in his gut, like most emotions that have been worn thin with too much use. Small urgencies flit through him like the lightning of a Quickening, intense as they happen but shaken off easily when finished. He is a man who has the undisturbed contentment of something that is not peace but is also not pain. The truths are: Methos is old, and one day he will die. The rest is just filler.

He remembers in bits and pieces. He records what he can, a passing fancy that's become more habit than need. The writing is no longer for himself, no longer informs his sense of self, but the elderly enjoy their rituals. He remembers when the world was all over ice. He remembers when the world was all over forest. He remembers when the oceans were impassable and the moon was huge in the night skies and people were as scarce as stars, as temporary as the breeze against his cheek. The New World is not new to him. There may be no-where that is not somewhere he has been before. He spends some time in the eighteenth century on the calculations-- years of steps travelled, and concludes nothing, loses interest before he completes the thought. He has lived so long that mountains he has climbed are ground away, that rivers he has washed in are canyons carved into the rock, that bones of those he has loved have been fossils and then been crushed to dust. He lets the memories go because there is no reason to hold onto them.

MacLeod would be bored with the truth, which is that-- excepting an eventful few years with Kronos-- most of the life he remembers is dull as dirt. The food he eats has changed many times, the tools he uses are increasingly new and strange, but he still sleeps every night and wakes each morning and the vastness of that sameness has long ceased to itch at him. He laughs about things like fire because he remembers when fire was sacred, but he laughs about things like mobile phones, too, because there'd been an age when the notion of people on the other side of _far away_ would have stunned him silly. He predates mythology. The first language he spoke had maybe a dozen words, and the name he bears now wasn't given to him til he'd been well on his way to ancient. He remembers rain and snow and flood and drought a thousand times over, but not the first time he laughed, not the first time he remembered how to smile after the Horsemen. He remembers women, because he has always been just a little lonely, but many of them are nameless, faceless, ghosts of ideas. He remembers children born of other men for though he laid with his women he had no seed, but he had tiny hands that touched his long nose and pulled his dark hair and he remembers burying all of them, giving them to the earth as he remained. He misses them, the idea of them, but he doesn't grieve, because grief is too hard to sustain. He welcomes the hot hard burst of pain at the moment eyes close forever, but no longer wonders if they'll be reunited. He won't know them even if they are. The mystic has no meaning, because its promises are all for mortal ever-afters. He only has ever.

MacLeod would be bored with the truth, because he's ever so young. He was born to such a time, so complete a time, so sophisticated, though MacLeod would laugh to hear him describe it so. But he was born to such fully-fleshed ideas. Clan. Nation. Duty. He will never understand why the word _brother_ is the most powerful notion Methos can imagine, even now. How very revolutionary that was to hear. He'd treasured Kronos for his youth, for his bright agile mind, for the hunger. There had been a thousand years before Kronos existed, a thousand years in which Methos had slept and waked and eaten and maybe once every few decades moved with a season, followed a herd somewhere slightly warmer, looked up to notice that the stars he'd used to know had gone dim and been replaced when his attention wandered. Brother, Kronos had called him, and though Methos knows so much more now and has so many languages for that feeling, so many words to pile around him like his books, the idea outlasts the ink, the idea is stronger than papyrus and parchment and paper. The part of Methos that remembers the first dancing flames springing like magic from the wood has only found four homes for that idea, and three of them have gone to the earth, gone with all the rest, all but the idea. The truths are Methos is old, and one day he will die, and one day so will MacLeod, probably. When they are dead brother will matter no more than anything else ever has, without Methos to remember it.

MacLeod has such a nuanced view on truth, the casual-philosopher's understanding that all these educated intelligent young people have now, in this world with words for everything, words that swirl and confuse and obfuscate and never quite pin to place what they're trying to. He wants so many words from Methos, he wants _explanations_ and _answers_ and _lie to me if you have to, just tell me something_. From Joe he tolerates it; Joe is a blink, Joe is a breeze that tingles along his spine and is forgotten after, but he likes Joe, and he lets slip the details that mean so much to him, to see Joe's eyes light with secrets. MacLeod doesn't ask him anything, really, til Cassandra, and suddenly the well is opened, the wound must be staunched. Methos tries. He does try, lightning dancing on his tongue as he tries to say things that surpass his ability. He is old, not special. He is lucky, not skilled. He is smart, but not brilliant, and the genius Kronos used to praise was mostly long experience.

He supposes there was a Game, in those long-ago days he remembers as if through a film of fog, but he doesn't know or doesn't recall. Even riding the desert with his brothers was so much sameness, unremarkable and now never to be remarked upon again, with three of them in the ground. I've been writing almost since writing began, he tells MacLeod when they meet, but he writes only the now, not the past. Brother will only be written for the one who lived, the one who will never really know what Methos means when he shapes the words _You're too important to lose._ There was no Game between the Horsemen, only the tie that felt true until it ended. MacLeod finds truth in the Game, which Methos supposes means there is a kind of promise between them, an endpoint and a purpose that will be tooled by the sword, but remembers the time before Iron, the time before Bronze, and dread is another thing he's long stopped feeling.

So Caspian goes; and Silas goes; and Kronos goes with Methos' name on his lips, and MacLeod remains. Methos remains. And he goes to a bed which is not so very different from a thousand other beds, sleeps as he has slept too many thousands of times to remember, wakes, eats, sits, walks, sleeps, wakes, sleeps, wakes. Wonders. And Methos puts his brothers in the ground and feels the burn of MacLeod like the first fire, wild and warm on his skin, and knows that in five thousand years he has learnt nothing, nothing at all.


End file.
